Hey and welcome back to another week! 👋 

In this issue:

• The One Skill That Differentiates: Visual Design. You may not like it but this is one of the only things that makes portfolios stand out in 2025.

• Vibecode With Me: I’m running a workshop with Uxcel and Lovable to show you how you can apply vibecoding to level up your prototyping & building skills (Lovable credits included). Save 25% on the regular price as a reader. Find out more below!

• Sydney’s Portfolio: What enterprise UX hiring managers love to see.

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This is why I teamed up with Uxcel and Lovable to bring you a 90-minute workshop where I’ll introduce you to Lovable, the best practices around vibe coding and we’ll actually produce something — every single one of you!

The workshop comes with 100 Lovable credits and one free month of Lovable Pro for every participant.

As a trusted reader of Open Doors you can save 25% on the standard ticket price with the code OPENDOORS.

How to Practice Visual Design Skills That Get You Hired 🎨

One of the most important skills that will set you apart as a designer in the current market — especially in early to mid-level roles — is your ability to produce high-quality visual design. This means visually sound UI and surrounding assets.

There are still roles where visuals aren’t the top priority. But if you look at the open market today, they’re becoming fewer and fewer. Strong visual skills have shifted from being a “nice to have” to a core differentiator.

Why? Over the last decade, many designers — especially those entering the industry — have built their careers on UX, strategy, and conceptual thinking. Those are still essential. But the bar for them has dropped. They’re easier to learn quickly, and as a result, more candidates can claim competency. Employers, in turn, now have the luxury of raising expectations and seeking out “unicorns” who can do both.

Visual craft is harder to fake. It’s harder to rush. And it stands out instantly when a recruiter or hiring manager opens your work. For early-career designers, it’s often the missing piece. For mid-level designers, it can be the factor that tips you into the next tier.

If there’s one skill beyond the hype around AI worth investing in this year, it’s building your visual design ability — including your taste, your ability to recognise strong design, and most importantly, your ability to create it.

First, a precursor: learn the fundamentals

Before you jump into exercises, make sure you have a foundation in the core principles of visual design. If you’ve learned through university, bootcamps, or self-teaching, this foundation might be solid — or it might be full of gaps. Many courses barely touch on fundamentals like alignment, hierarchy, rhythm, and contrast.

If you don’t know them yet, make time for it. My top recommendation here is Uxcel, which offers free courses on the basics, with gamified learning, community feedback, and affordable paid upgrades for in-depth material. Compared to bootcamps and many other courses out there Uxcel really gives you more bang for the buck than any other and teach you the fundamentals well.

Learning principles first is like learning scales before playing songs: you’ll recognize them in the work you study, you’ll understand why something works, and you’ll be able to apply it deliberately. You can learn them by copying designs until they click — but it will be slower.

Exercise 1: Copy & Study

Take a high-quality design. Copy it exactly. Then study it.

Start by picking something widely recognized as good design. For example, an Airbnb screen. Paste a screenshot into Figma at its original size, then create a new frame over it at 50% opacity. Trace it.

Some things will be easy — alignment, spacing, general layout. Others will frustrate you. You’ll discover that matching the font family and size for a heading doesn’t make it look identical. That’s when you explore other settings: leading, kerning, weight.

When you’ve finished copying, study the decisions. Why is there more space above the heading than below? Why is this button size used here but not there? You’ll start recognising principles like the law of proximity in action.

Repeat this process across multiple designs. Ten. Twenty. More. It’s an exercise you should keep returning to whenever you find a design you admire.

Exercise 2: Small Modifications

Once you’ve built a library of exact replicas, pull one out and modify it. Keep the change small — a new button, a minor content section, an extra feature.

For example: add a DJ toggle to Spotify that seamlessly mixes all tracks. Your challenge is to make it look as if Spotify themselves designed it. That means matching spacing, colors, typography choices, and component styles exactly.

The goal here isn’t to create a portfolio piece, but to train your ability to work within an established visual system.

Exercise 3: Concept Adoption

Now it’s time to go bigger: adopt an entire design concept.

Take Airbnb, which doesn’t have a dark mode, and create one. On paper, that’s a simple inversion. In reality, Airbnb’s visual language depends heavily on white space — and translating that into dark mode without losing balance is tricky.

If you get stuck, pull in another design you’ve studied that does have a successful dark mode. Compare how it layers colors, manages contrast, and treats “empty” space. Then merge what you’ve learned into your Airbnb adaptation.

This is the hardest of the three exercises, but when done well, these projects can make for strong “playground” portfolio pieces.

What to practice on

At first, it doesn’t matter what you copy — as long as it’s good design. You’ll learn fundamentals like typography, hierarchy, and color from any high-quality work.

As you progress, start focusing on the type of design you want to work on:

• If you’re aiming for SaaS/B2B work, study dashboards, data tables, and sidebars from tools like Linear or Notion.

• If you’re aiming for consumer-facing work, study rich, complex product UIs, multimedia layouts, and mobile app flows.

The patterns differ. SaaS often prioritizes clarity, density, and scalability. Consumer-facing work may emphasize personality, motion, and storytelling. Eventually, you want to be fluent in the patterns of your chosen domain.

Helper tools and systems

You don’t need these at the start — fundamentals come first — but they can speed you up later:

• 4px grid – Improves spacing consistency across your designs.

• Tailwind (or other) color systems – Treat colors as hue-based scales, making it easier to stay consistent.

• Type scales – Use predefined modular scales to keep typography harmonious.

• Component libraries – Not to copy blindly, but to study how established systems handle states, responsiveness, and density.

• Contrast checkers – Ensure your color choices meet accessibility standards without sacrificing aesthetics.

These won’t replace fundamentals, but once you understand why they work, they’ll help you execute faster.

Make it a habit

When I was a junior, I set aside 30–45 minutes every morning before my main work to do these exercises.

At first, I chose projects that were too big and never finished in time. Over time, I learned to pick smaller chunks — one screen, one element — and build on it the next day.

You don’t have to do it daily. Even every other day will make a huge difference. A few weeks of consistent practice will noticeably improve your portfolio. A few months will transform it.

And when you revisit old work, you’ll suddenly see exactly how to fix it — and you will.

TL;DR

• Visual design skills are one of the top differentiators for designers in 2025, especially in a competitive job market.

• Start by learning fundamentals, then work through three progressive exercises: Copy & Study, Small Modifications, and Concept Adoption.

• In time, focus your studies on the patterns and components most relevant to the work you want to do.

• Use helper tools only after you’ve grasped the underlying principles.

• Build a regular practice habit — even in short, timed sessions — to accelerate improvement.

Mastering visual design isn’t instant. It’s a skill built through repetition, observation, and deliberate application. If you start today, your work — and your opportunities — will look very different a few months from now.

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👀 Portfolio Showcase

Today: Sydney Rasmussen

Sydney Rasmussen’s portfolio shows how thoughtful storytelling and modern design practices can make enterprise UX shine.

Sydney is a US-based product designer, still earlier in her career but already with real-world experience. Her portfolio is not the kind that shouts for attention with visual gimmicks or wild experiments — instead, it’s the kind that works. Clean, structured, and clearly thought through. That makes sense given her focus: she positions herself toward enterprise UX and impact-driven design, and her portfolio backs that up. It’s the type of work that won’t appeal to every company — a consumer-facing brand looking for splashy, ultra-polished mobile prototypes won’t find what they’re after here. But for B2B SaaS or enterprise environments, Sydney presents herself as someone who can fit right in and deliver business results.

That’s it for this week—thanks so much for the support! ♥️

If you’d like to support my efforts on Open Doors further you can buy me a coffee. If you ever got any value from my emails consider it so I can keep this newsletter free and available to everyone out there.

Do you want your own portfolio reviewed in-depth with a 30-minute advice-packed video review? Or do you require mentoring to figure out a proper strategy for your job search?

I got you!

• Book an in-depth portfolio or resume review with me

• Book a mentoring session with me

• Book a quick 15 min chat to ask a question and see if we vibe

Keep kicking doors open and see you next week!
- Florian